Friday, December 28, 2012

Blaming the Atheists for Mass Shootings

A number of influential political and religious public figures have used
this heartbreaking massacre as an opportunity to blame or marginalize
nonreligious people, and to decry religious pluralism and the separation
of church and state. Shortly after the shooting, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said: “When you have an anti-religious, secular bureaucracy… seeking to drive God out of public life, something fills the vacuum.” Mike Huckabee claimed
the shooting happened because America has “systematically removed God”
from public schools.” James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, had this to say:
“Millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist, or he’s
irrelevant… Believe me, that is going to have consequences … I think we
have turned our back on the scripture and on God almighty and I think he
has allowed judgment to fall upon us.” Bryan Fischer, spokesperson for
the American Family Association, said
that God could have protected the victims of this massacre but didn’t
because “God is not going to go where he is not wanted.” In other words:
if we want to ensure that students are safe in their schools, we’ll
need to incorporate Christian theology into public schools’ curriculum.

You know what this is? It's just more of the deflection game. Most of the people who blame godlessness for the frequency of mass shootings are pro-gun folks who, like Wayne La Pierre, desperately want to deflect attention from the first real problem, gun availability to unfit people.

Since the percentage of Americans who identify as atheists is small, it's hard to draw a valid conclusion about what attitudes atheists, as a group, hold, other than denying the existence of God. Adding one new person to the group will cause wild swings in the data.